Summer Poems

by Mary Oliver

from her collection, Red Bird (2008).


Summer Morning

Heart,

I implore you,

its time to come back

from the dark,

it's morning,

the hills are pink

and the roses

whatever they felt

in the valley of night

are open now

their soft dresses,

their leaves

are shining.

Why are you laggard?

Sure you have seen this

a thousand times,

which isn't half enough.

Let the world

have its way with you,

luminous as it is

with mystery

and pain--

graced as it is

with the ordinary.


Summer Story

When the hummingbird

sinks its face

into the trumpet vine,

into the funnels

of the blossoms,

and the tongue

leaps out

and throbs,

I am scorched

to realize once again

how man small, available things

are in this world

that aren't

pieces of gold

or power--

that nobody owns

or could buy even

for a hillside of money--

that just

float about the world,

or drift over the fields,

or into the gardens,

and into the tents of the vines,

and now here I am

spending my time,

as the saying goes,

watching until the watching turns into feeling,

so that I feel I am myself

a small bird

with a terrible hunger,

with a thin beak probing and dipping

and a heart that races so fast

it is only a heartbeat ahead of breaking--

and I am the hunger and assuagement,

and also I am the leaves and the blossoms,

and, like them, I am full of delight, and shaking.